gigabit switches/nas/prosafe firewall

[drable]

hey everyone,

i'm looking to upgrade my home network to gigabit ethernet and was wondering if anyone has any suggestions as to gigabit switches for around 4/5 computers. i've been looking around but all i could see were one or two products from belkin and linksys. has anyone had any good experiences with anything - if so please share!

also, i currently have a netgear prosafe firewall plugged into my cable modem. would i be able to keep that filtering my internet and connect the prosafe to a gigabit switch? would that still allow me to share my filtered internet whilst providing gigabit for access to a nas drive or would i have problems with nat and dchp over two distributers? (internet->prosafe router->gigabit switch->computers+NAS)

finally, does anyone know of any decent gigabit NAS drives around 250gb size? all the ones i've found are either a good size but no gigabit or gigabit but too big.

thanks in advance for any advice to any of the above!

cheers,

drable

[MovedGoalPosts]

to Cable Forum

Hmm, home network, Gigabit speed, sounds a bit excessive to me, but each to their own You should also be aware of ntl's user piolicy that limits you to 3 PCs.

Of course regardless of the speed of the LAN, your Internet connection will still only connect at the maximum 10meg, or whatever speed you have, so you LAN speed will be pegged to that for any internet. Thus your LAN speed at Gigabit will only benefit for internal file shares.

A switch or hub at any speed, does not have any DHCP server on it, thus it won't add a layer of IP addresses to your network. Thus you just plug your switch in between the router and computers and that should do the job.

[drable]

Rob - thanks for such a quick reply.

I should have been more clear in what I meant. I'm only looking to move up to gigabit hardware for the benefit of streaming to/from a NAS drive. I understand that my cable can only go 10mb tops.

don't routers assign internal ips (nat) through dchp though? currently all of my home network runs off 192.168.x.x addresses distributed from the prosafe.

in reality my holy grail would be to keep the prosafe as a filter for the cable then pass that through to the switch which connects all the computers and gives them access to a gigabit nas drive and a filtered cable connection. is this possible? any suggestions for specifics (gigabit or nas) still much appreciated.

cheers,

drable